Communities

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and a privilege to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich. The predecessor of his whom I knew best was Launcelot Fleming, now long-since dead, but I cannot help feeling that his spirit emerged in all the speeches I have heard in this debate, and that has made it the richer.

I join others in congratulating both noble Lords who have made maiden speeches. Of course I congratulate my noble friend Lord True. He had the good fortune to have been born into a family with a name to which everyone is likely to respond enthusiastically and warmly. Those with the ill luck to have been born into families who are less happy gradually manage over the years to change that. However, I am personally sorry that that admirable firm of solicitors in County Sligo, Argue and Phibbs, which I always looked up in the Irish telephone directory every time I went to Ireland, has finally and at last gone out of business. As to the noble Lord, Lord Noon, he and I met only once. He may well not remember it, but we broke bread on the subject of cricket. Anyone with that avocation is bound to be worth listening to on almost any subject. I congratulate him most warmly.

Of course I congratulate my noble friend Lady Newlove, not only on providing us with the opportunity for this debate, but on the quality of her report. I do not know how many noble Lords who are not taking part in the debate, but are sitting in the Chamber, have had the opportunity to read the report. To those who have not done so, I commend it very warmly indeed. It is comprehensive, and the fact that it has more than two dozen footnotes is itself an index of the extent of the reading that my noble friend has done. I am enormously impressed by the great storehouse of material that it fulfils.

My noble friend has a particular characteristic in the way in which her views come through, which was reflected in a remark long ago by Ronnie Knox, the Catholic convert theologian, who said that history has been changed by people who start their sentences with, “I believe”, rather than, in the English manner, “One does feel”. I have to say to my noble friend that throughout her report, “I believe” came through very strongly in every sentence. I have to say also that those thoughts remind me of my noble friend Lady Thatcher. I cannot conceive of the words “One does feel” falling from her lips. My noble friend Lady Newlove has the same adamantine convictions. I hope we can envisage a pocket version of her report in a Penguin format that we can slip into our pockets, because there is so much material in it that is sensible to carry about one’s person.

I particularly admire her insistence on clear purposes. When I was brought up, I was once taught by someone who said, “If you do not know where you are trying to get to, any road will get you there”. There is much to be said for having a clear idea of where you are trying to get to and how you are going to do it. The report has lots of suggestions, stories and recommendations. Beyond my noble friend’s conviction comes through the sense of her stamina. During the war, Winston Churchill had 10 ideas a day; one was normally good and the other nine were less good. My distant kinsman, the 1st Viscount Alanbrooke, a great-granduncle to the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, had the responsibility, as Churchill’s CIGS, of explaining to him that the last nine ideas were not very good. That was not the easiest thing to do. The great thing about my noble friend’s report is that she will have a much higher strike rate and—I think she realises this already—although some of the ideas in the report may not necessarily find acceptance among those to whom they are directed, she gains greatly by the rich number and variety of ideas that she has put forward.

My qualifications for speaking in this debate, I suppose, are that I represented for nearly a quarter of a century the inner-city seat of the Cities of London and Westminster, known as the “Two Cities”. It was an interesting seat to represent because of its particular profile. The European Union, with slightly mistaken statistics, believed that it was the richest area in the whole EU. I will not go into what the statistical error was, but it was also almost certainly the only Tory seat in the country which came in the top 50—or the bottom 50, if you like—for poverty, and possibly the only Tory seat in the top 100.

An inner-city seat is likely to have considerable poverty. I may not be able to produce examples to which my noble friend will respond, but my two favourite examples were in the wards of Soho and Pimlico. When I was first elected, there were 10 candidates standing. We all received an examination paper from the Soho Society to find out how much we knew about Soho before we arrived, which was an extraordinarily good stimulus to subsequent research. It is a community where 2,000 people live and 40,000 people work. The marvellous thing about it is that it is a totally united community, from both quarters. In 1981, it had 164 sex establishments. Although that is a different kind of antisocial behaviour than that which my noble friend is talking about, it was a major task to transform it, but transform it we did, so that old ladies who had hitherto not been too keen on having to walk down the street past Sodom and Gomorrah suddenly found that their visits to the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers had become possible again.

The drugs tsar under the previous Administration was against the silent majority giving money to beggars in Soho because she knew perfectly well that it was all going to go on drugs; but as an index of the integrated society, it was a Soho beggar, invisible to most people as they walked up and down the street, who made a significant contribution, literally at street level, as an observer, to the swift arrest of the bomber whose third attack was on the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho. Everybody plays their particular role, however they are operating within the community.

I entirely endorse what was said earlier about living in the neighbourhood. When we were taking the Licensing Bill through in 2003, when the Government were moving powers to magistrates, it was noticeable to everyone who lived in Soho, the people who were going to be on the receiving end of the changes, that the magistrates who would be making the decisions lived 50 miles away and would not themselves have any experience of what it was like to be in Soho at three o'clock in the morning.

As for Pimlico, in 1987, the Peabody Trust, which has a large estate not only in Pimlico but in Victoria and elsewhere—it has at least 2,000 homes in my former constituency—decided that no priority was to be given to those who came from families who had been living in Peabody accommodation for the past four generations. I told the trust that I thought that it was making a significant mistake and that the integrity of an inner-city community such as that was greatly assisted by continuity. I am glad to say that, 10 years later, in 1997, it agreed and introduced a quota system to make it possible for families to remain. That was wholly to the good. The noble Lord, Lord Best, who knows much more about these matters than I do, says that the shift that I described in 1997 is now prevalent throughout housing management. Although it is 10 years since I was the local Member, I have a continuing interest in the St Andrew’s youth club, half a mile from here, which is, if I may say, oxymoronically described as the oldest youth club in the world.

To the wide variety of subjects in my noble friend’s report, I add a few grace-notes. I respond extremely well to her emphasis on thinking outside the box. Personally, I believe that help is defined by the receiver rather than the giver, and it should be our watchword to make more important the Duke of Wellington's insistence on working out what is happening on the other side of the hill. The drugs tsar whom I quoted a moment ago had previously been the homelessness tsar, and she actively discouraged charitable groups from the Midlands who were paying away-day visits every two or three months to provide a soup kitchen in Soho. That was not the most effective way of responding to the problem and it was better done by those who were living with the problem on a day-to-day basis.

One problem that my noble friend Lady Newlove identified was the level in government departments and other public bodies at which decisions are taken. I am personally in favour of decisions being taken in organisations at the lowest possible level, but I am conscious that government departments vary, and that shows up in the level at which submissions to Ministers are signed off. Some take it right back up to the top before putting them in front of the Minister; some, happily, can even do it below the level of an assistant secretary. However, that is something of which anyone who deals with public bodies has to be aware.

I concur with my noble friend’s observations and ideas about funding and incentives. I commend to her the practice followed by Mr Ben Whitaker, the husband of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, when he was the United Kingdom director of the Gulbenkian fund. In the distribution of small grants, he identified a single individual to be the distributor in each county, and he then drip-fed them with cash as their money ran down so that consistency was maintained in that area.

I have one question for my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, to whose wind-up speech I greatly look forward. What are the lottery guidelines of the Big Lottery Fund, which has taken over the combined original roles of the Millennium Commission and the charities distributor, established in 1993 and 1994? My noble friend Lord Heseltine, who was the only Millennium Commissioner to go right through from the beginning to the end, was very keen on matching funding. However, as my noble friend identified, matching funding is potentially a problem. It would be helpful to know what the Big Lottery Fund’s instructions are, because the big society is a prime potential target for the Big Lottery Fund as a client.

I concur with my noble friend’s request about simplifying paperwork. I understand what she implies about auditors but, as Oral Questions frequently remind us in connection with the European Union, audits and auditors are necessary concomitants in the use of public money. When I was in the private sector, we did pro bono work for appropriate causes but at a level of 10 per cent of our ordinary fee. We insisted on 10 per cent because that left the client with a stake and an ownership. Therefore, when we served Jack Profumo in finding a chief executive for Toynbee Hall, he got a bill which stated the whole fee and we then gave a discount of 90 per cent, leaving him to pay the last 10 per cent himself.

I strongly approve of my noble friend’s ideas about people having to spend one day in outside organisations. In a longer speech I would refer to one that I did myself in my constituency. Given the present excitement about House of Lords reform, it would be no bad thing if Members of the House of Commons had to spend a day here in order to get a rather better idea than they have at the moment of how we operate. I totally agree with my noble friend’s views about having people in continuity.

Finally, I much admire the projects that she cited at the end. I hope that my noble friend is moved by her clients calling her projects “Newlove projects”, and I hope that in the fullness of time her clients will say in suitable gatherings, “Yes, we’ve been Newloved too”. I realise that, as 14 appears on the Clock I have to sit down, but my last words must be, as she recommends in her report, “Thank you”.